by Yehuda Koren
I saw two extraordinary handsome human beings in the prime of their lives – but the glamour was overshadowed by the cringing posture and bowed head. The appalled, averted gaze and devastated expression of Adam and Eve just expelled from Paradise. They might have been battling against a swirling sand storm, as if although only a few feet away, they were in another universe.
A few days later Ruth and Alan came to the flat in Fitzroy Road. With Frieda clinging to her father’s legs and baby Nicholas moaning miserably from his cot, ‘Ted and Assia seemed overwhelmed, even more accused and guilty than at our previous meeting. Now all I could feel was pity – for both of them.’
Hughes’s first impulse was to make a clean break and get away from England, toying with every possible destination as far as China. But he soon realised that his children needed to be stabilised. His aunt Hilda found it difficult to cope with the children and, after nearly a month away from her Yorkshire friends and administrative job in a factory, she wanted to leave, complaining to the downstairs neighbour Dr Trevor Thomas that she ‘didn’t like London, the people, the shops or the situation upstairs’. She disapproved of Assia’s presence and thought that the children would be better off in the United States, promising Sylvia’s mother to bring them herself if Ted did not do it. Ted’s mother could not help with the children since she was housebound in Yorkshire with arthritis and his sister, Olwyn, was not yet ready to give up her thrilling job in Paris.
Realising that a nanny cannot replace a mother, Hughes implored Assia to come and live with him. He assured her that she could rely on his true emotions and intentions. Assia consented but, as much as she yearned for his commitment, she made it clear that her move was temporary; her husband was at his mother’s bedside and she wished to spare him a further blow. As she settled in her rival’s flat, she established herself as the lady of the house by showing the door to Sylvia’s friends, the gatekeepers who were constantly around. Lunching with Nathaniel Tarn, Assia looked unwell and did not touch the food. Though she raved about Ted having everything – charity, energy, love, genius – the list of his vices was as long as that of his virtues: she was alarmed by his voracious sexual appetite, his superstitions about marriage and his black moods. She felt that he was withdrawn and that he refrained from sharing his work with her, unlike David, who was not secretive about his writing, always let her in and made her feel that she was participating in it. But curiously, as much as her husband and her lover were worlds apart, she found them both irritating with their Puritanism. All in all, Tarn concluded, Assia was lost ‘in a maze of reasons for NOT deciding’.
Not until 15 March 1963, did Hughes collect himself enough to write his account of the tragedy to Aurelia Plath, in order to counterbalance the letters Sylvia must have written to her. In Sylvia’s last month, he said, they became friendly, and were closer than they had ever been in the last two years; he had intended to take Sylvia on a holiday by the sea that fatal Monday. Hughes portrayed himself as the one who tried to heal the marriage, persuading Sylvia to halt the divorce proceedings, and wrote that they were close to restoring their union. Aurelia Plath, who had the habit of scribbling her reactions on margins of letters that she received, noted down cynically, ‘through adultery with Acia Weevil?’. The spelling mistake indicated that the otherwise pedantic Aurelia Plath never read Assia’s name in her daughter’s or in anybody else’s letters. Hughes adhered to the reconciliation theory throughout his life and, in 1981, wrote to Dr Keith Sagar, his friend and critic that, by December 1962, Sylvia had ‘almost completely repaired her relationship to me’.
Hughes suspected that Aurelia Plath has asked her daughter’s friends in England to inform her of his whereabouts, collecting evidence against him, so that eventually she could take her grandchildren to the United States. But he had nothing to worry about: his family and Sylvia’s friends sent Mrs Plath censored and favourable reports on life in Fitzroy Road: the house is spotless, Frieda is far happier and more at ease and has a hearty appetite, Ted ‘looks so sad and so bent down’, he and Nurse Jean ‘are determined to bring those children up well and happy’. In the conspiracy of silence shared by all, Assia’s presence in Sylvia’s flat was kept a secret from Mrs Plath, who was led to believe that the only feminine presence there was the nanny.
There was another secret to be kept: Assia’s pregnancy. There was no question about it being Ted’s child, since for the past months there had been no sex between the Wevills. But Ted wanted no more children and, although Assia enjoyed the company of Frieda and Nicholas, she still abhorred the idea of pregnancy, birth and child rearing. Visiting her friend Celia Taylor in the maternity ward after the birth of her first son, Assia shuddered, ‘How can you let that thing chew your breast?’ And even if she and Ted wished to keep their love child, Plath’s suicide made it morally unacceptable.
On Thursday, 21 March 1963, Elizabeth Compton, Sylvia’s friend, took her daughter Meg to London for a treat after doing her 11+ exams, dropping in on Ted and the children. ‘You know she’s living here?’ whispered the nanny. ‘Who?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘Mrs Wevill. But they are out, she’s having an operation.’ ‘What kind of operation?’ inquired Elizabeth suspiciously. ‘You know,’ said the nanny evasively. As Elizabeth waited in the sitting room, the entrance door opened and she glimpsed Assia’s stately figure swiftly disappearing up the stairs into the bedroom. ‘I had to go and see a succession of Harley Street bastards,’ Assia confided in her friend, Peter Porter’s wife Jannice, who was a nurse. She finally found an old Polish doctor in Maida Vale, who was kind and human. ‘Could you come to visit me on Friday or Saturday in the ghost house? 23 Fitzroy Road,’ she pleaded with Jannice, asking her to burn the note.
Recovering in Sylvia’s bed, Assia was reading the just-published The Nabobs, a study of the social life of the English in eighteenth-century India, by Percival Spear. On a card that she left in the book, she inscribed a sentence that caught her fancy: ‘The throats of our wrists brave lilies.’ It was taken from ‘Stings’, Plath’s poem that deals with the conflict between her domestic and poetic selves, as she aspired to get away from the beehive that had become a prison. Underneath the quote, Assia described her mood: ‘so this is what’s like. Time stretches on and on and on and on … it’s like being four again by oneself … Tired. Not to bed, but tired, caged, slightly, upstairs.’
On another strip of paper, she phrased her basic queries to Ted, partly in Hebrew, partly in English: ‘what do you want? What do you need? You’re only in possession of what you don’t want. Why are you relieved that I’m no longer pregnant? And when I’ll go back home, will you be less sad?’ The list ended with a statement in Hebrew: ‘I’m just like Marilyn Monroe in the shape of a hot-water bottle.’
David Wevill did not know of the drama that was unfolding in London and was joyful about the sudden remission of his mother. He broke the good news to Assia and got ready to leave Canada by the end of the month. Not indifferent to competition, Ted wished to secure Assia for himself before her husband’s return. He was fully aware that love had not died in the Wevill household and in his overwrought letter to Assia from 27 March, he was careful not to present his love for her as stronger than her husband’s. He promised Assia that she had no reason to doubt his love: even his wife’s suicide did not transform his feelings towards Assia: ‘it’s just shown me how final they are.’ He tried to reason with her that divorcing David was unavoidable and that the sooner it happened the less misery for all involved. His main concern was the welfare of his children and his future with Assia. He argued that while David was waiting for the affair to exhaust itself, he believed it would last, and urged Assia to choose between them. Desperately, he wrote, ‘if you stay with David I don’t know what I shall do.’ Assia was not convinced and they argued fervently about it. A few days later she returned to Highbury Place to wait for David.
On Saturday, 6 April, shortly after his return from Canada, the Wevills sailed on the night ferry to Dublin and rente
d a tiny Fiat. Assia brought with her the red exercise book she had already bought in October 1962, at a major crossroads in her life, when Ted Hughes left his family. But still, in the following turbulent months, the pages had remained blank. The first entry was made on 8 April 1963, in a Galway café, sitting at a table with an embossed white plastic cover and three daffodils in a vase, waiting for the dark-uniformed waitress with the starched apron to bring her order of bacon and tomatoes. Assia used a black fountain pen, her handwriting rapid and dense, with hardly any corrections, using only the right-hand pages. A hawk-eyed, critical observer, she noted, ‘most Irish women are next to plain, most over 25 look ugly. They look to be without spirit, and suffer from piety. Piety makes plain women. The men, though, shine with something, sex maybe, or dissatisfaction, or good looks. The red, blue and black looks they have are masculine, women fade with it.’ She got the impression that ‘there are enough people who are poor and frightened enough to work as servants. But they look so infinitely more ambitious than the best-paid English.’
Less than two months had passed since her lover’s wife had committed suicide and she herself was recuperating from a recent abortion and torn between a husband and a lover – yet none of these momentous events was even hinted at in Assia’s diary. Furthermore, reading the ten-page account of the Irish journey, one could get the impression that Assia was travelling by herself. As if rehearsing to become a travel writer, she described Galway as ‘dour-snug, Catholic, clean and bereft, utterly bereft of joy’. A shopping addict, she noted with disappointment that all the shops offered the same meagre choice of goods: ‘Cadbury’s Easter bunnies and Yardley’s 4/9 talcum powder’. She also recorded that ‘prices are high – “tea” for two will amount to 12/–.’ Her language was extravagant, as if trying to impress her notebook with her choice of imagery – ‘Ireland is wounded in a tea rose world of white flannels and well-connected curates’ – but her tone was often ill tempered (‘I sound as though I have toothache. Well, I have …’). Unlike Plath, who fell in love with the country and wanted to move there immediately, Assia disliked the experience. ‘The Irish have no sense of taste whatsoever, the villages are ugly, there are no gardens, their clothes are ugly, their food is unspeakable. Only the country is beautiful.’
The Wevills drove to Cleggan and waited in the grey building of the Pier Bar for poet Richard Murphy. David went out to speak to the fishermen and Assia drank ginger ale and stared at the fifty-odd cut-out sea birds, which were stuck on the wall. When Murphy arrived, he was astounded by Assia’s ‘Babylonian beauty’ and ‘voluptuous bosom’. He ‘assumed they had come to find out what had happened at Cleggan to Ted and Sylvia’. Almost forty years later, David Wevill denies any knowledge of Plath and Hughes ever making the same journey: ‘no footsteps were being followed. My mother’s family was Irish, and with her failing health, I was curious to see the country. We both needed a break, following the turbulent events in London and in Ottawa.’ Not wishing to impose on Murphy’s hospitality, they returned later that day to their hotel in Galway.
Once again, Ireland failed to heal a marital discord and during the trip Assia and David ‘attacked each other like cats’. They subsequently agreed to a six-month trial separation – which seemed a common panacea for couples in crisis at that time. David would use his Gregory grant to go to Spain while Assia could live with Ted and the children. To Tarn, she confessed that it was not a trial separation ‘but it’s really for good’. On 5 May Assia bade David farewell at the station; he was travelling to Paris on the way to Barcelona.
Locking up her flat and settling in Sylvia’s, Assia rearranged it to her taste, throwing colourful fabrics on the furniture, replacing the pictures and scattering objects that she and David had brought from Burma. But although all parties to the ménage accepted the interim solution, Assia did not celebrate her freedom to love. On 15 May 1963 she turned 36, but felt a hundred years old. David was hardly gone and she was already gnawed with remorse. Flashbacks of him flooded her, as he was tying his shoelaces on the chair in the Chalcot Square kitchen – the sun behind him – ‘the absolute grace of him, and his beautiful head in profile, straight, pale hair, massed across his forehead. The sun is in ashes.’
When Assia shuttled between the two men she was in control but with David absent, she felt lost in Ted’s domination and under Sylvia’s shadow. ‘I’m immersed now in the Hughes’s monumentality, hers and his,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their mysterious seven years.’ She mourned: ‘my third and sweetest marriage. David, my sweet husband, my most always favourite, my best and truest love. What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me to sentence him to being alone, and myself to this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night.’
Thirteen
Domesticity
London, summer 1963
During most of May, Assia was bedridden with an excruciating bout of chronic cystitis. ‘There’s a bruise on my left bosom. Ted inspects it with pleasure,’ she wrote in her diary. She put on make-up but soon her face was teary and watery with mascara and she felt that her sickness made her ‘a total loss’. When Theresa, the new au pair, implied that her ailments might be psychosomatic, Assia was appalled: ‘How COULD it be? My God – what if it never went?’ She was impatient to get well, afraid that Ted might find her repulsive: ‘If we can’t make love properly again, I’d just as soon not live.’ Her illness removed whatever self-esteem she had, ‘I have no will, no talent, a slight decorative intelligence and cystitis. Not enough vanity. No husband.’ She shuddered at the possibility of rotting slowly on Sylvia’s bed – ‘not this one – the cost is too high’ and consoled herself that until the end of the month she still had her Highbury flat. She would go there, lock herself in and swallow the 25 sleeping pills that she had accumulated, and end her misery. Nobody could rescue her, since only David had the other key and he was away in Spain. He, so she felt, was the only person who would truly grieve for her. Rather than an actual death wish, it was the sleepless, edgy and wretched state she was in that made her morose. As she recovered, she regained her spirits and set out to devour life.
For the previous sixteen years, since marrying at twenty, Assia had lived only as one of a pair, but she easily added the role of stepmother to that of spouse. ‘I kissed Nick’s neck over and over again. It kills me when he gurgles with it,’ she wrote in her diary. She found Ted’s children docile and touching and enjoyed the domestic scenes; she described Frieda leaning on Ted’s knees, murmuring to herself and entertaining all with cute witticisms like ‘the light hurts’ or ‘make the room brown’. When Nicholas waddled in, his sister would pile up all her possessions into a mound to keep them for herself. The three-year-old loved to take her blanket into what was now Ted and Assia’s bedroom and adorn herself with Assia’s jewellery and cosmetics. ‘Fantastic, the way children (not even my own) have finally surrounded me. The children I like, very much. I shall like them even better, I think, when they are a little older.’
Dr Trevor Thomas was displeased with the change of tenants in 23 Fitzroy Road. He had not get along with Sylvia Plath and Assia and Ted irritated him even more. Living on the ground floor, by the main entrance, they treated him as a caretaker; there was no entrance phone, and they instructed their guests to buzz his bell, so that he would go and open the front door and save Assia or Ted the trouble of coming down the stairs to let the guests in. Once, when they returned from a weekend in the country, Thomas heard agitated voices and water being poured repeatedly on to his glass roof, as if someone was trying to wash something. The water soon dripped into his flat, and he shouted up for them to stop. The following morning, he discovered what the fuss was all about: ‘It seems the people above had bought the fish before going away and had left it in a carrier bag in the sink. In the hot weather, the inevitable had happened, and they threw it out of the kitchen window’: the rotte
n fish had crashed on to Thomas’s glass roof. On another occasion, thinking that they were away again, he heard a door banging in their flat after midnight. He went into the entrance hall. The front door and the landing door were wide open and he could hear voices upstairs. Since the area had had a spate of burglaries in recent weeks, Thomas quickly dialled 999. Several patrol cars arrived within minutes and he directed the officers up. They banged on Hughes’s door, Ted opened up and, after some angry exchange with the officers, shouted: ‘It’s only that silly old fool downstairs.’
Life eventually assumed quasi-normality in Ted and Assia’s household. Assia’s observations of him recorded in her diary offer a rare, first-hand account of Hughes at work: he would sit sideways, cross-legged, against Sylvia’s black desk that was too small for him. Sipping tea from a mug, a sandwich in one hand and a pen in another, he was writing voraciously. ‘His nostrils flared, his hair feathery, and leaping forward like a peacock’s back train in reverse, swaying a little as he writes. Rather like a great beast, looking over an enormous feast, dazzled and confused by the variety.’ Lifting her eyes and gazing at Ted’s face intently, she was impressed by the massiveness of his square chin, which seemed to her to account for an eighth of his total weight. She could watch him for hours on end and, with a painter’s perception, noted that even physically Ted consisted of at least four different men; his high profile, discounting the deeply set eyes, was very similar to an etching they had of Holbein’s Henry VIII. The left-hand side of his face seemed much younger and more handsome than the rest, and en face, with his eyes fully focused, ‘one loses track and is either dazzled or dismayed. His mouth is grim – it’s a sand ditch’. One night she was startled when in the half dark, Ted lay naked and the thick hair on his chest and stomach formed a diffused, moving and moustached face, like a tattooed snake. Assia experienced a panic and was overtaken by an image of the black killer-monster that used to frighten her in her Berlin childhood home.